A typical wire bonding system includes a work holder mounted on a positioning table such as an X-Y table. A device that is placed onto the work holder to be wire-bonded may carry one or more materials such as an integrated circuit chip on-board (“COB”) or a light-emitting diode (“LED”). The wire that is bonded may be made of gold or copper, for which ball bonding utilizing a capillary is typically used, or aluminum for which wedge bonding utilizing a wedge bonding tool is typically used. For wedge bonding applications, the wire bonding system may be fully-automatic or semi-automatic. Semi-automatic wire bonders require manual loading and unloading but have the advantage of flexibility when conversion of the wire bonding system for other types of electronic devices is required.
In a wire bonding system which uses a single worktable, the operations of wire bonding are sequential. For example, a material such as an LED board is first loaded onto a substrate. Then, pattern recognition (“PR”) is conducted for visual alignment of the LED board and substrate using an optical system such as a CCD camera. After visual orientation, wire bonding is carried out on the LED board. The bonded LED board is unloaded once wire bonding is completed, before another LED board can be loaded onto the substrate to repeat the operations.
The sequential operations result in lower units per hour (“UPH”) produced since time is consumed for non-productive operations such as loading/unloading of the device and pattern recognition. These operations are essential and cannot be eliminated. Therefore, it would be desirable to achieve a higher UPH by performing the productive bonding operation and the abovementioned non-productive operations simultaneously.